TROY — Young students are diving into social media with little understanding about the digital footprint they're leaving behind online, and the city school district is teaching them how to be on guard through a program called "Digital Citizenship in the 21st Century."

"We're trying to protect them for the future," said Jamie Holmes, the district's elementary library media specialist.

Holmes and Christina Anne, a prevention counselor with the Rensselaer County Department of Mental Health, designed the program for the district's fifth- and and sixth-graders. In fifth grade, students begin to explore social media websites, and by sixth grade, Holmes said, they're fully engaged.

The students, however, don't know that what they do online trails them as they grow older. It's not wiped out with a delete button as many of them believe, Holmes said.

Digital Citizenship aims to get students to take responsibility for their actions and learn how to guard access to their profiles on YouTube, Facebook and other social media site.

"Kids are turned off when you tell them they're not old enough," said Anne, who works in the five elementary school.

In their second of three classroom sessions Wednesday, the students were quickly catching on to what they face online.

"It's teaching me a lot about computers. What you do on the computer and what other people do," said Tyra O'Meally-Turnbull, a sixth-grader at School 18.

Thomas Harkin, an other sixth-grader at School 18, uses Instagram for the photo exchanges and said he has learned to delete inappropriate messages.

Protection for the students means instructing them that they shouldn't make a friend of everybody online. There's often a competition to have as many friends as possible, Holmes and Anne said.

The students are taught how to limit contacts as well as how to behave responsibly, Holmes said. This in turn, helps counteract and prevent cyber bullying, she said.

Surveying more than 350 students in the district's five elementary schools, Holmes and Anne found that about 25 percent use social media more five hours per day.

Holmes said she's adept a social media website, but found out from the students about 11 sites that were new to her.

Holmes and Anne said they're reaching out to the parents with information so they know what their children face as they explore the Internet. "We're trying to open the lines of communication with the students and their parents," Holmes said. "We need to talk about it."